Apple's easy-to-use iMovie software turns your home movies into slick productions, often comparable to those of professional editors. Jeff Carlson explores the features that will make Windows users sick with envy.

From the author of

From the author of

Preparing to embark on a vacation to Alaska, my wife and I decided at the
last minute to buy a digital camcorder and dive headlong into the world of
video. We were bound for Alaska, after all—land of abundant
wildlife, calving glaciers, and near-perpetual daylight at certain times of the
year. The only video I'd shot previously was at my cousin's wedding
years earlier, using my father's antiquated, bulky VHS recorder. This new
camcorder fit into one hand. How things had changed!

Two weeks and six full MiniDV tapes later, I sat down at my PowerBook G4 and
fired up a little application that I'd previously launched only once:
iMovie. In less than two hours—without any instruction—I'd
imported some footage, edited it, added titles and music, and uploaded a
one-minute short
to a web page for family and friends to view.

Whether you're shooting vacation highlights, sporting events, or the
school play, iMovie gives you the capability to turn that footage into something
your friends and family will want to watch. Best of all, iMovie is easy and fun
to use. You don't need to be a professional to operate it: iMovie is used
by school kids, moms and dads, and aspiring filmmakers alike. You can jump right
in without knowing a thing about video.

Importing Footage: Direct to Mac

Most consumer camcorders record footage to MiniDV tape, due to the immense
amount of data video required. To get that footage onto your computer, you
connect a cable to the camera's 1394 port, a high-speed data transfer
technology Apple invented and refers to by the less-geeky name FireWire. Unlike
many Windows PCs, every Macintosh sold since 2001 includes at least one FireWire
port. When you connect a camcorder, turn it on, and launch iMovie, the Mac
recognizes the camera model and puts you into iMovie's import mode. Moving
the video from the camera to the Mac's hard drive is as simple as pressing
a single Import button.

Professional video editing applications require you to manually review the
footage and set markers that identify where each clip begins and ends. By
contrast, iMovie does that work for you: As video is saved to the hard disk,
iMovie automatically creates individual clips based on when you started and
stopped recording (see Figure 1). The end result is a collection of discrete
video clips ready to be edited, rather than one large video chunk.

TIP

A preference setting in iMovie allows you to take the chunkified route if you
want; also, if you don't mind sacrificing some time in order to save disk
space, you can review the tape and manually import selected clips.

The latest version, iMovie HD, imports more than just the common-variety
standard definition (SD) digital video. If you have access to one of the newer
high-definition video (HDV) cameras, such as Sony's $3,500 HDR-FX1, you can
bring that high-resolution footage directly into iMovie for editing. Previously,
editing HD required tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment.

NOTE

I need to pause briefly to stave off any HD-induced confusion. HD video comes
in several varieties. HDV is a consumer-grade version that provides high
resolution—either at 1,280 × 720 pixels (known as 720p) or
1,920 × 1,080 pixels (known as 1080i)—but at the expense of
higher compression. The processor in the camera reduces the image quality using
MPEG-2 compression, the same high-quality encoding used for DVDs, which makes
the data fit onto normal MiniDV tapes. When you import HDV into iMovie, the
video is converted to Apple Intermediate Codec (AIC), which is easier to edit
than MPEG-2. HDV is still high-quality stuff, and looks good on a shiny HD
television, but pros who use top-tier HD formats to shoot major feature films or
television shows can tell the difference.

In addition to SD and HDV formats, iMovie HD can import MPEG-4 video from
newer tapeless camcorders that record directly to memory cards, as well as from
Apple's iSight videocamera.

Best of all, you can mix and match these formats in your movies. Did you
shoot some of your vacation using a MiniDV camcorder, and some of it using a
separate MPEG-4 camcorder? Or maybe you used your digital still camera's
movie mode to capture some video? Perhaps you shot some scenes with your
camera's 16:9 (widescreen) feature enabled, and others in the regular 4:3
aspect ratio? iMovie handles it all, and adjusts the video to fit. For example,
bringing 16:9 footage into a 4:3 project automatically letterboxes the 16:9
footage, so you can capture the full expanse of that last night's sunset.
Or import HDV footage into an SD project, and the image will be resampled to fit
the lower-resolution SD format.